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Category: Ora Harris

It was a special time for jazz in the Bay Area. For most of the ‘70s and the early ‘80s, a small club called Keystone Korner presented a dazzling array of jazz greats from around the world. The interest in the jazz genre that the Keystone generated still is felt today and recalled in a new book of photographs and oral history by Kathy Sloane.

The club became a jazz venue when a young San Francisco musician, Todd Barkan, wandered into a rock club looking for a gig. “I just was kind of a naïve hippy that had a jazz band, and actually I went to see Freddy Herrera, who owned this little bar over in North Beach, and I said, ‘Would you book my jazz band?’ And he said, ‘I hate jazz, and plus that, it doesn’t draw. I’m going to open a big rock venue in Berkeley (which became Keystone Berkeley). Why don’t you buy this club, and you can book yourself?’”

Barkan knew nothing about running a night club, but he did know about jazz. He bought the club for $12,500 and with help from family and friends proceeded to turn it into a world-class jazz spot that helped revitalized the idiom, which had been greatly diminished by the rock revolution.

Barkan was able to book the greatest names of the genre, including Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, and the club favorite, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Kirk, was best known for playing saxophone and two strange sax-like horns, the manzello, and strich, all at once. One scribe wrote he looked “very much like a kid trying to eat three bananas at once. Making this weird spectacle all the more impressive was that Kirk was also blind.”

Regulars at the club also included saxophonist Dexter Gordon, pianist Bill Evans, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, all of whom recorded albums at Keystone that are still available.

Like Barkan, author-photographer Kathy Sloane was introduced to the club by happenstance. “I was dating a guy named Bob Bray, who was a drummer and he took me to Keystone one night, and I walked in and I was blown away,” she recalls. “He brought me back the next week he introduced me to Todd Barkan and said to him, ‘You should let her come in here and photograph whenever she wants and don’t charge her.’ And Todd said, ‘Okay. All she has to do is give me a photograph of each band that she photographs, and she can come whenever she wants, except on weekends when there were a lot of people.’ And that was it,” Sloane remembered.

Post-World War II San Francisco enjoyed a healthy jazz scene, with numerous jazz clubs dotting the Fillmore, the Tenderloin, and North Beach neighborhoods. But in the late ‘60s most of them disappeared with the rock revolution; by the early ‘70s many of the greatest jazz performers had very little work, but gigs at the Keystone helped rejuvenate their careers.

There were a few locally-based artists who headlined, too: Bobby Hutcherson, John Handly, and guitarist Calvin Keys. Keys recalled, “You were on the desert dying of thirst and then you came upon the waterhole. That’s what KK was. It was a waterhole. Keystone was something special, because of Todd.”

Today, frontline jazz is often presented in concert venues at prices that contrast sharply to Keystone’s bargain admission. “First, you gotta lay out a lot of money if you’re going to have dinner and catch a set. It was another era then, and jazz was not a high ticket and high maintenance event,” says California-Poet-Laureate-Emeritus Al Young who was a Keystone regular back in the day.

The music and the prices were a great lure, but so was its warmth and friendliness. “The audience could go into the back room, there were no doormen, nobody asked who you were and if you weren’t important enough you couldn’t do that,” Sloane recalls.

Rick Baskin was a young law student and a Keystone habitué.

“It was dark, it was smoky, it was intimate,” he says. “You were close to the musicians, it was unpretentious. It was the real deal. You could feel the musicians. You could talk to them. They were right there in front of you.”

For the musicians and the listeners the family atmosphere, the soulful atmosphere at the club, was enhanced by great food.

“The food worked well with the music,” says Harris. “As a matter of fact, Rahsaan would sing a song about, “Eat that fried chicken. Eat that fried chicken now. People who did not eat fried chicken, they ate brown rice, sautéed vegetables, and corn bread. It was healthy food. It was very healthy. That was our vegetarian meal that sold out every night. If I remember now, they were like $2.50 for a dinner.”

Despite the respect and loyalty, the curtain closed on Keystone Korner in the summer of 1983. Larger Bay Area venues like Kimball’s and Yoshi’s had appeared and prospered, and the careers of many of Keystone’s regular attractions were healthier than ever before. And, as their agents lifted the musicians’ prices, the little joint next door to the police station had more trouble than ever paying its bills. When the Keystone was padlocked by the Internal Revenue Service, Todd Barkan exited to New York City, eventually becoming artistic director of Dizzy’s, the jazz club that is part of the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex.

Jazz these days is different. The close-knit sense of community between the players and the audience is rare, but Kathy Sloane’s photographs preserve the spirit of Keystone. “In retrospect, it was extremely unique,” she says. “There was no club I’ve ever been in where the musicians were permeable. There was no separation. That doesn’t exist now, and after KK closed, there was no place like that, certainly not in the Bay Area.”